Mark Gresham reviews Emory's recent music-and-science performance of "Creation of the World" for ArtsCriticATL.com:
"In the beginning was the Sound. The big bang. From that event more than 13 billion years ago, science tells us, the universe rapidly expanded and cooled enough that its white noise of energy could change into subatomic particles. Those particles later joined to form atoms, and those atoms combined to form molecules, eventually leading to the emergence of life. Biochemists are researching what harmonious chemical conditions might have led to the emergence of life.
"Science isn’t the only field to speculate about the origins of the universe and of life. Explorations of the relationship of music to the fundamental nature of the cosmos go far back in history, from the teachings of Pythagoras and the ancient Chinese “yellow bell,” which served as a foundation of not just music but of all physical measurements, to the medieval European concept of musica universalis, the 'music of the spheres.'"
A painting titled "Astronomer Copernicus, Conversation with God," by artist Jan Matejko.
Why did the Catholic Church put Galileo on trial for heresy when he argued that the Earth revolves around the sun? Why do many people today not believe in evolution, despite overwhelming scientific evidence?
The tension between religion and science is not something new, nor is it likely to ever go away, despite accumulating knowledge about the natural world, says Robert McCauley, director of Emory’s Center for Mind, Brain and Culture. His latest book is called “Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not.”
“Religion is cognitively natural and comes easily to the human mind. It trafficks in the kind of ideas that minds like to think,” McCauley explains. “By contrast, science is always pulling together representations and models and ideas that are quite contrary to our normal assumptions about the world.”
In other words, science often butts heads with common sense.
“A classic illustration is, even though it’s the case that we think we are all Copernicans and everyone understands that the Earth circles the sun, the fact of the matter is when we look at the night sky, we don’t see the world as Copernican,” McCauley says. “Once you undergo the intellectual exercise to see the world as Copernican, it’s startlingly unnerving.”
"Galileo Facing the Roman Inquisition," a painting by Christiano Banti.
On the other hand, the seeds of religious belief may be inherent in our minds as far back as infancy.
“We are having to figure out what other people are thinking and why they’re doing what they’re doing in order to anticipate things that they might do, whether it’s for survival in a complex social setting or a more fundamental issue of detecting agents that may want to have you for lunch, ” McCauley says.
A neuro-imaging study shows that personal values that people refuse to disavow, even when offered cash to do so, are processed differently in the brain than those values that are willingly sold.
Sacred values prompt greater activation of an area of the brain associated with rules-based, right-or-wrong thought processes, the study showed, as opposed to the regions linked to processing of costs-versus-benefits.
Berns headed a team that included Emory economist Monica Capra; Michael Prietula, a professor of information systems and operations management at Emory's Goizueta Business School; a psychologist from the New School for Social Research and anthropologists from the Institute Jean Nicod in Paris, France. (Click here to see the full list of names.) The research was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.
“We’ve come up with a method to start answering scientific questions about how people make decisions involving sacred values, and that has major implications if you want to better understand what influences human behavior across countries and cultures,” Berns says. “We are seeing how fundamental cultural values are represented in the brain.”
The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record the brain responses of 32 U.S. adults during key phases of an experiment. In the first phase, participants were shown statements ranging from the mundane, such as “You are a tea drinker,” to hot-button issues such “You support gay marriage” and “You are Pro-Life.” Each of the 62 statements had a contradictory pair, such as “You are Pro-Choice,” and the participants had to choose one of each pair.
At the end of the experiment, participants were given the option of auctioning their personal statements: Disavowing their previous choices for actual money. The participants could earn as much as $100 per statement by simply agreeing to sign a document stating the opposite of what they believed. They could choose to opt out of the auction for statements they valued highly.
“We used the auction as a measure of integrity for specific statements,” Berns explains. “If a person refused to take money to change a statement, then we considered that value to be personally sacred to them. But if they took money, then we considered that they had low integrity for that statement and that it wasn’t sacred.”
The brain imaging data showed a strong correlation between sacred values and activation of the neural systems associated with evaluating rights and wrongs (the left temporoparietal junction) and semantic rule retrieval (the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), but not with systems associated with reward.
“Most public policy is based on offering people incentives and disincentives,” Berns says. “Our findings indicate that it’s unreasonable to think that a policy based on costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people’s behavior when it comes to their sacred personal values, because they are processed in an entirely different brain system than incentives.”
Research participants who reported more active affiliations with organizations, such as churches, sports teams, musical groups and environmental clubs, had stronger brain activity in the same brain regions that correlated to sacred values. “Organized groups may instill values more strongly through the use of rules and social norms,” Berns says.
The experiment also found activation in the amygdala, a brain region associated with emotional reactions, but only in cases where participants refused to take cash to state the opposite of what they believe. “Those statements represent the most repugnant items to the individual,” Berns says, “and would be expected to provoke the most arousal, which is consistent with the idea that when sacred values are violated, that induces moral outrage.”
The study is part of a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, titled “The Biology of Cultural Conflict.” Berns edited the special issue, which brings together a dozen articles on the culture of neuroscience, including differences in the neural processing of people on the opposing sides of conflict, from U.S. Democrats and Republicans to Arabs and Israelis.
“As culture changes, it affects our brains, and as our brains change, that affects our culture. You can’t separate the two,” Berns says. “We now have the means to start understanding this relationship, and that’s putting the relatively new field of cultural neuroscience onto the global stage.”
Future conflicts over politics and religion will likely play out biologically, Berns says. Some cultures will choose to change their biology, and in the process, change their culture, he notes. He cites the battles over women’s reproductive rights and gay marriage as ongoing examples. Images, top and bottom: iStockphoto.com.
Neuroscience promises "startling new insights about science, about religion, and about their comparison," says Robert McCauley. Photo by Kay Hinton.
The conflict between the scientific mindset and the religious mindset is an old one. What’s new are tools of cognitive science that allow us to probe why we choose to follow paths of religion and/or science, says Robert McCauley, a philosopher of science at Emory.
McCauley’s written a new book, “Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not,” in which he explains why the modern-day version of science is more in danger of extinction than religion.
Here’s an excerpt from a Boston Globe interview with McCauley:
BOSTON GLOBE: Why do you say religion is “natural” but not science? MCCAULEY: Religion overwhelmingly depends upon what I’m calling natural cognition, thinking that is automatic, that is not conscious for the most part. Once our attention is drawn to it, we find it fairly difficult to articulate. For example, when we talk, our talking arises pretty spontaneously and yet it’s incredibly complex. We’re conforming to all sorts of rules about our natural language, which we’re usually incapable of articulating.
Science, probably more than any other human intellectual endeavor, supersedes natural cognition. It’s conscious, usually in the form of language. It’s usually slow, it’s deliberative. Science is extremely unnatural. That’s why scientists have to take courses in all these things--and then it’s still hard. The products of scientific reflection are inevitably radically counterintuitive. They challenge common sense. Read the whole Boston Globe interview here.
Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Emory Center for Ethics, sparked a debate with his proposal in New Scientist to develop a unifying symbol for science: A sort of bumper sticker for passionate nerds, and those who support their mission. Wolpe writes:
"A single, unified symbol would have many uses. It could be displayed to represent a position: opposition to the politicizing of science in government, support for increased research spending, or concern about global warming and species loss. It could be displayed by an astronomer or geologist or sociologist or teacher as a symbol of their allegiance to science. It could be used on car bumpers and web pages, and in public venues. ...
"Perhaps it could even accommodate a cross or star of David or some other symbol to state: 'I am a Christian (or Jew or Muslim) and support science as an enterprise.'"
Do you agree with Wolpe? You can send your ideas for a symbol to sciencesymbol@emory.edu, or join the discussion via a special science symbol Facebook page Wolpe set up.
To teach my biology class today, I took three planes for a total of 9,000 miles nearly halfway around the world. My students have left their sandals at the door. As I walk in, they sit, maroon-robed and expectant, cross-legged on the floor. My body clock registers 11:30 p.m. the day before. I write on the board: "Are bacteria sentient beings?"
This is my fourth year coming to Dharamsala, India, home of the Tibetan government in exile, in the foothills of the Himalayas, as part of an unusual collaboration—the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative—between the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives and Emory University. About seven years ago, the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of the Tibetans, invited Emory to develop and teach a contemporary science curriculum for the more than 20,000 Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns in exile. …
Over the years, I've come a long way from thinking that teaching science to Tibetan monks and nuns is just a cool thing to do. The monastics, on the whole, are astoundingly open-minded and approach problems with a thoughtful rationality that is, ironically, often missing from my Western colleagues' approach to science and the world. An ancient Zen koan goes something like: If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. That is, destroy preconceptions, question everything—especially if you think you've figured it all out. Most of the monastics in my classroom embody that attitude.
They are busy integrating East and West at the cellular level, re-examining everything they thought they knew. For them, the question of whether bacteria are sentient has serious karmic implications. If these single-celled organisms are, indeed, sentient beings, then any other sentient being could be reincarnated as a bacterium. They face this question with calm, engaged clarity, ready to rethink and integrate whatever they may discover.
Is that a MacBook Air Steve Jobs is presenting to the masses, or a bible for the cult of mass celebrity?(Photo credits, above and below: iStockphoto.com.)
Steve Jobs has been the object of numerous memorials, and tributes - more than a million - are being posted on Apple’s “Remembering Steve” webpage, with condolences as well as testimonials about how Jobs and his products have touched and indeed transformed the lives of countless individuals.
Make no mistake about it, the veneration we are seeing in the aftermath of Jobs’ death is religious through and through - not “kinda” religious, or “pseudo” religious,” or “mistakenly” religious, but a genuine expression for many of heartfelt sacred sentiments of loss and glorification.
It is not tied to any institution like a church or to any discrete tradition like Buddhism; it is, instead, tied to a religious culture that will only grow in significance and influence in the years ahead: the cult of celebrity.
As more and more people move away from conventional religions and identify as “nones” (those who choose to claim “no religion” in polls and surveys), celebrity worship and other cultural forms of sacred commitment and meaning will assume an even greater market share of the spiritual marketplace.
In life Jobs may have been something of an enigma who maintained his privacy and generally stayed out of the public limelight. In death, Jobs now is an immortal celebrity whose life story, incredible wealth, familiar visage, and igadgets will serve as touchstones for many searching for meaningful gods and modes of transcendence.
It has been said that death is the great equalizer - rich and poor, successes and failures, the powerful and the disempowered cannot escape the one inevitable fact of human existence.
Jobs and other celebrities cannot escape this reality, but unlike you and me, they live on in the memories of fans and followers and become guiding lights in the mundane darkness of our ordinary lives.
Emory religion scholar John Dunne moderated a session called “A Role for Theology," which is summed up on the conference web site:
“If our world view is one based on contemporary science as well as the deepest wisdom of many religions, a world view that claims we are radically interrelated and interdependent with all other forms of life, then we will, or should, respond to our present crisis with similarly radical changes in our thinking and behavior. But do we? This is the critical question for all fields of concern with climate change, including the religions – and it is a very difficult one. What causes people to change at a deep enough level so their behavior changes as well? The shock of climate change may be the catalyst to awaken us from the lie of the current world view of individual fulfillment through consumerism, to the reality of fulfillment by sharing with needy fellow creatures and the Earth itself, through religious understandings of limitation, detachment and self-emptying.”
About 75 college students sat on yoga mats, taking deep breaths as they contoured their bodies in different positions.
Last week’s yoga class taught Emory University freshmen how to make their bodies stronger and more flexible. Students also learned how yoga could reduce their stress — a crucial lesson as they embarked on their first college midterms all while adjusting to living on their own.
This balance of physical, emotional and spiritual well-being is a cornerstone of Emory University’s new Health 100 course, a requirement for all freshmen.
Several colleges across the country have added programs and requirements in recent years to address students’ physical health and combat the obesity epidemic. But Emory officials have taken a more holistic approach and created a course based on the research they’ve conducted on predictive health, which stresses maintaining good health and preventing disease as opposed to just curing illnesses people already have.
The course abandoned the “do this, don’t do that” mentality found in most health lectures, said Michelle Lampl, director of the Emory Center for the Study of Human Health. “We are not here to admonish or preach to the students,” she said. “We are teaching them a healthier approach to life. They didn’t come here to fill their heads while destroying their bodies.”
Rather than professors lecturing to students, upperclassmen teach the class through small-group discussions. They help the freshmen come up with health goals and give advice on different aspects of college life. Read the whole article in the AJC.
Emory geologist Woody Hickcox feels a special kinship with Charles Darwin, and it’s not just because of a slight physical resemblance. “Nothing in geology or the natural world makes any sense without his theory of evolution,” Hickcox says. “He’s sort of the kindly grandfather of us all.”
Hickcox, a senior lecturer in the department of environmental studies, has taught at Emory for 27 years. He’s also a talented artist. His murals and paintings of nature, especially birds, can be seen throughout the Math and Science Building.
When Hickcox was invited to create a piece in celebration of the Fernbank Museum’s special Darwin exhibit, he chose to do a larger-than-life, impressionistic portrait of the English naturalist, who established that all species of life have descended from a common ancestor.
“I feel very close to him as a scientist, and painting him brings me closer to him as a person. The melding of the two is greater than the sum of the parts,” Hickcox says. “You can see in his face that he went through a lot, that there were a lot of trials and tribulations in his life, aside from the science that we are all struggling to understand.”
Hickcox says that while painting the portrait, he thought about Darwin as “a normal person,” instead of the myth. “He’s not the devil. He’s not really different from any one else. He’s just a really smart guy who, in a sense, got really lucky to go on the ship he went on. And he was one of those people who were able to bring a tremendous amount of material together.”
The portrait of Darwin is part of the show “Selections,” works of art inspired by evolution, that will be on view at the Fernbank throughout the Darwin exhibit. The eight Georgia artists in the show include other scientists from the department of environmental studies: Anthony Martin and Berry Brosi, and former faculty member Lore Rattan, who left Emory last year to pursue her art full-time.
You can meet all of the artists, and ask them questions about their work, at the official opening party for “Selections,” on Friday, October 14, from 6:30 to 7:30 pm at Fernbank.
Cats with bits of luminescent jellyfish DNA. Sheep-goat hybrids, "geep," with furry legs and floppy ears. Human stem cells inserted into the brains of newborn mice. Embryonic screening that allows parents to choose to implant an embryo without the breast cancer gene. Human-human chimeras that allow gay couples to have children that belong, biologically, to both of them.
To paraphrase Dickens, these are not things that will happen in time, these are things that are happening.
Speaking from a Jewish law perspective about the ethics of reproductive technologies, Rabbi Michael Broyde, a law professor at Emory University and a member of the Beth Din of America, the largest Jewish law court in the country, is just getting warmed up in his delivery of the Decalogue Lecture for Emory's Center for the Study of Law and Religion Sept. 13.
He's enjoying the reaction this bioethically edgy information, complete with slides of an adorable glowing kitten and a geep, is getting from his audience.
Broyde has covered artificial insemination: "No adultery is associated with AI. The dominant Jewish law view doesn't look at misplaced paternity, absent sexual conduct, as a moral or religious wrong... It's even discussed in the Talmud."
And cloning: "When people think of cloning, they think of Star Wars, or The Boys from Brazil. They are opposed to cloning because they think it will allow creation of armies or will be used in some way that's dehumanizing. But cloning could be a form of assisted reproduction for profoundly infertile people."
Broyde moves on to reproductive xenotransplants -- the placing of a fertilized embryo of one species into the uterus of another species.
"Like human-animal chimeras, when cells of a human are mixed with cells of another mammal, basic ideas of human identity come into play," Broyde says.
"Of course, one definition of humanity is, that which comes from a human mother is human," he adds. "Yet, if you put a human fetus in a gorilla and it gives birth to a human being who, six years later, is playing chess or reading or engaging in other human activity, there's no doubt at all that Jewish thought would label that a human being even if the mother is not."
Broyde says these frightful, fascinating visions are no reason to halt the advance of assisted reproduction, no matter how rapidly the biotech may be slip-sliding into areas that make us uncomfortable.
Robey Tapp loves history and science and has served as a docent at Emory’s Carlos Museum for the past six years. She is also an independent artist who works in fiber. When she was invited to create a piece for the Fernbank Museum’s special Darwin exhibit, opening on Saturday, Sept. 24, Tapp started reading up on the England of Darwin’s time. That’s how she stumbled across Mary Anning.
Anning was a contemporary of Darwin’s, a self-taught paleontologist, who made key findings that supported Darwin’s theory of evolution. She grew up poor on the southern England coast and did not receive full scientific credit for her work during her lifetime, due to her gender and working-class status.
A painting of Mary Anning, left, hangs in the Natural History Museum of London.
“Every day she walked along the water in Lyme Regis where she lived,” Tapp says. “She saw things in the rocks and she dug them out.”
In 1811, when Anning was just 12 years old, she and her brother Joseph discovered the fossil of an entirely new animal, later named Ichthyosaurus. Throughout her life, Anning continued to make discoveries, working tirelessly along the rugged coastline.
“What inspires me about her is that she believed in herself and her findings despite the fact that it went against the religion of the time,” Tapp says. “She was really upsetting the apple cart. And she didn’t stop because she was a woman, and people told her that women couldn’t be scientists.”
Anning died poor but “her work lives on,” Tapp says. In 2010 the Royal Society included Anning in a list of the 10 British women who have most influenced the history of science.
Tapp’s fiber art inspired by Anning is part of the “Selections” show at Fernbank. Local artists, including scientists from Emory’s department of environmental studies, have created pieces influenced by evolution. The art will remain on display during the museum’s special exhibit commemorating the life and mind of Darwin, which continues through January 1.
Conservators put the finishing touches on what was a major makeover for the 4,000-year-old mummy, one of only half-a-dozen in the world dating back to Egypt's Old Kingdom.
The mummy from 2300 B.C. was in a sorry state when he arrived at Emory in 1921. Headless, his neck bones had tumbled into his abdominal cavity. Gaping holes and sagging linens marred vague remnants of shoulders, hips and knees. One conservator likened his physique to a crushed bag of potato chips.
Today, the oldest Egyptian mummy in North America has a new lease on the afterlife and is featured in a Michael C. Carlos Museum exhibit, thanks to a patient group of Emory conservation experts, anthropologists and doctors.
"Life and Death in the Pyramid Age: The Emory Old Kingdom Mummy" places the mummy in the context of ancient Egypt's burial rites and rituals, along with exploring the social and political changes at the end of the Pyramid Age. Approximately 120 objects from the Carlos Museum's collection and borrowed from other museums and private collectors will be on display through Dec. 11.
They include a life-size replica of an Old Kingdom tomb, "magic" vessels and wands used to recite spells on the dead, and a rare statue of Pharaoh Pepi, who ruled during the mummy's lifetime.
"This mummy is a very important piece. We've finally been able to conserve it and put it on display," says Peter Lacovara, the Carlos Museum's senior curator of ancient Egyptian, Nubian and near Eastern art.
Listen to leading Egyptologists discuss the history of the mummy and the site where it originated:
It was a long road to get the mummy ready for prime time.
Acquired by Emory theology professor William A. Shelton in 1920, the mummy was the first inventoried object in what was then the Emory University Museum of Art and Archaeology.
Dismissed as a massive reconstruction effort, the mummy was squirreled away in two crates in storage (one for his body and one for his head, that had fallen off).
At Lacovara's nudging, the mummy identified as "1921.1" was retrieved about a year ago and carefully transported to Emory University Hospital for X-ray and CT radiographic imaging.
Modern technology revealed much about the early mummification process, which used a combination of salts, oils and resin. It also permitted the conservation team to peer inside the mummy to assess the body's condition without actually unwrapping him. Exposing the body would have been disrespectful as well as damaging, notes Carlos conservator Renee Stein.
"The overarching goal of the project was to restore some structural integrity to the body and dignity to human remains," she says.
The mummy predates the period when the brain was removed during the embalming process, and the head contained a walnut-sized piece of material that appears to be the dessicated brain.
With the help of radiology professor William Torres, who has examined several Carlos mummies, the conservation team learned that the mummy's bones were well-mineralized, it hadn't suffered any major head trauma and it hadn't been prone to ear infections. Although his pelvis was obscured, the group determined that the mummy was most likely a male, given the size and shape of his skull.
All in all, "this was a pretty healthy individual," says Emory anthropologist George Armelagos, who was involved in the examination effort.
In light of the physical evidence and that the mummy had been buried at a holy site, conservators safely assumed that the mummy had access to a good diet and other social advantages. The cause of death, however, remained a mystery.
The Carlos Museum called on Mimi Leveque, a freelance conservator from Boston. Leveque has lent her expertise to several of the dozen mummies in the Carlos collection, the youngest of which is 2,000 years old.
One of the most glaring issues with the Old Kingdom mummy was his displaced head. The mummy originally was laid on his right side (a common burial position at the time), his head supported by a headrest. Over time, the headrest had been lost, along with the bulk of his coffin, leaving the head unsupported.
In the slideshow below, see images of the mummy before the makeover, and listen to Egyptologists discuss mummy science:
As a solution, Leveque relied on low-tech methods, carving out a piece of archival-quality foam and wedging it in the hollow between the mummy's collar bones and shoulder blades. She then threaded a padded dowel in the foam and through the hole at the base of the skull.
The mummy's jaw was cast from a mold from a similarly-sized, more modern jaw from Armelagos' lab. Two undergraduate interns used an epoxy putty to form missing bones for the hands and feet. They placed the bones inside padded papier-mache forms, wrapped in modern linen that was dyed to match the ancient wrappings.
Once intact, the mummy appeared lifelike, as if he had just lain down to sleep.
Eventually the mummy, one of only a half-dozen from that period who have survived, will be a permanent fixture at the Carlos. Due to his fragility, he will not tour.
Ancient Egyptians believed that by visiting tombs and actively remembering the dead through images, mummies were kept alive in the afterlife, explains Lacovara.
"In recreating the tomb and restoring the Old Kingdom mummy, we are fulfilling his wish," he says.
Steve Jobs once said, “Almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. “
That quote, and the terror of a lab safety violation, lead to some serious, last-minute soul searching in “Tick Tock,” winner of both Best Picture and Best Director at the 2011 International Campus Moviefest, recently announced in Hollywood.
Emory junior Ien Chi wrote, directed and edited the short film. The psychological drama was shot in one take on Emory’s Oxford Campus. Shown in reverse, the movie ends, or should we say begins, with a twist. It has already become a YouTube hit with nearly 1 million views.
Chi describes his heroes as Steve Jobs, Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci. It will be interesting to see where this eclectic mix of science, technology and art leads him next.
Is it possible to achieve such an enlightened mental state that you feel one with everything? These days, it’s a question explored by both neuroscientists and religious leaders.
In the above video, Australian TV presenter Karl Stefanovic interviews the Dalai Lama, and puts a new spin on the age-old question. What starts as an awkward moment is transformed by the Dalai Lama’s laughter.
"Molecular diversity underpins both the structural intricacy of biology, as well as the complexity of our ideas and dreams," Lynn says.
By Carol Clark
"My brother liked to build models. And I liked to blow them up," recalls David Lynn, chair of Emory's chemistry department and the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Chemistry and Biology.
Their childhood experiments led to his brother's career as a building contractor and Lynn's as a groundbreaking chemist who is not afraid to make sparks fly. "The joke in the family is, it's a good thing that we no longer collaborate," Lynn says.
Lynn received the 2011 University Scholar/Teacher Award, selected by Emory faculty on behalf of the United Methodist Church Board of Higher Education and Ministry. He was recognized for his contributions to plant chemical biology, dynamic molecular self-assembly, chemical evolution and chemical education.
Lynn's chemical interests grew beyond explosions while he was a college student in North Carolina. "One day, I walked out of an organic chemistry class and I noticed a leaf on a tree branch that was hanging over a banister," he says. "I thought, ‘That leaf is coordinating billions of reactions going on all the time.' I remember marveling at that, and I've never stopped marveling."
That simple insight drove Lynn to focus on how order comes from chaos. After joining Emory in 2000, he helped establish the Center for Chemical Evolution, a collaboration between Emory, Georgia Tech and other institutions, funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA. The center is testing theories for how chemical reactions may have led to life emerging from Earth's primordial soup, some 3.5 billion years ago.
In 2002, he received the Howard Hughes Medical Institute award, worth $1 million. He used the funds to create a program called On Recent Discoveries by Emory Researchers (ORDER), a series of seminars where graduate students teach freshmen.
"Rather than just spending 24/7 in a lab, graduate students need to put their research into a broader context and learn to explain it to the public," Lynn says of the philosophy behind ORDER. An added benefit of the program is exposing freshmen to the possibilities of a career in academia, nurturing growth of the research community, Lynn says.
Lynn is also committed to helping the lay public understand the ongoing research into the evolution of life, and its relevance to modern-day life. Atlanta is an interesting location to focus on this goal, he says, since it is the epicenter of the debate between science and religion.
"This is where the friction is, and where you have friction, that's where changes can occur," he explains.
Both religion and science strive to make sense of the world, Lynn says. Rather than reciting facts that demonstrate evolution, Lynn believes that the best way to help people understand it is through compelling stories. He has helped pioneer collaborations between Emory scientists and playwrights, dancers and other artists. The recent performances of a science flash mob in downtown Atlanta, using a group of people to show how molecules evolve, is one example of this daring convergence of science and art.
"Sixty percent of Americans don't accept the tenants of evolution because they don't see them as part of their experience," Lynn says. "So somehow we need to find ways to create space for a dialogue. If there is one lesson that emerges from the study of chemical evolution, it is that molecular diversity underpins both the structural intricacy of biology, as well as the complexity of our ideas and dreams."
Even amid the diverse crowd on the Emory campus, six new students stand out. They are Tibetan monks from India, sent by His Holiness the Dalai Lama to learn science and teach it to other monastics as part of the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative.
While learning biology, chemistry and physics, the young monks are adjusting to a culture of pizza, laptops and Facebook. "It seems like here, time is moving very fast," says Kunjo Baiji, one of the student monks. "In India, time is slowed down and there is enough time. But here, everybody looks very busy."
As part of Tibet Week at Emory, Buddhist studies faculty and students will take on science faculty and students in a debate on evolution, karma, reincarnation and ethics. The debate begins at 7:30 this evening in the Carlos Museum Reception Hall.
What do ancient African deities and modern psychoanalysis have in common? In a recent talk at the Carlos Museum, Emory psychologist Marshall Duke cited revelations by Jung when he traveled to Africa in 1928. Emory’s ThoughtWork provides this summary of Duke’s comments:
"Freud and Jung were very close to one another. It’s said that when they first met each other they spoke without stopping for twelve or thirteen hours. They respected one another for a period of time, but interestingly, they broke with one another based upon Freud’s rejection of religion and Jung’s belief that religion was inherently important in human behavior. They drifted apart because each one believed the other would never change. And they were right ...
"Jung differed from Freud in terms of his belief in what he called the collective unconscious. Jung felt there was something more than the personal experiences of an individual’s life that were stored in the unconscious mind. Jung in fact believed that there were memories and images and roles that were passed along from generation to generation to all people, that everyone shared certain capacities and beliefs.
"When Jung was very young, he believed, as many kids do, that mysterious things happened in his life. He believed that his mother, after falling asleep, moved through the house as a spirit, and was a bit frightened by this. In order to deal with it, it’s reported that he took a ruler from his pencil case and carved a small mannequin, a small figure, out of the ruler and he put it in his pencil case and kept it under his bed. Over time, he gathered small stones and painted them particular colors in different configurations and put them into his box as a way of protecting himself. He just sort of came up with this.
"In 1928, he traveled to Africa and visited Kenya. He came upon people who had small mannequins and little stones and all sorts of things like this. Reportedly, he said to himself, 'My God, how did I know about this without ever learning about it?' This is where his concept of the collective unconscious supposedly began."
A handful of U.S. prisons have opened their doors to an ancient form of meditation from India known as Vipassana, which means “to see things as they really are.”
Some of the prisoners who practice the technique for 10 to 13 hours a day “finally come to terms with some of the things that they have done,” says Ron Cavanaugh, director of treatment for the Alabama Department of Corrections.
Meditating prisoners at the Donaldson Correction Facility in Bessemer, Alabama, have become more social, says Kathryn Allen, the prison psychologist. “They’re more honest, more open, more genuine, and they want to serve others,” she says, by volunteering in the prison hospice and teaching fellow inmates who are illiterate how to read and write.
Inmate meditation at a prison near Seattle "really changed the whole facility," says Ben Turner of the Vipassana Prison Trust. “Even officers who were earlier skeptical became really supportive because they saw such behavior changes in the inmates that it made it a more pleasant place for them to work.”
The Vipassana meditation technique is based on the teachings of the Buddha, but is purely secular and designed to relieve suffering through self-awareness, Turner says.
A meth lab explodes: In some rural areas, the American dream also seems to be going up in smoke. (iStockphoto.com)
From the Mideast to northern Africa and Wisconsin, extraordinary scenes of unrest are roiling the world stage. All of these political dramas stem from some of the same factors driving a methamphetamine epidemic in rural America.
People everywhere should understand that “our personal lives are tied to these tremendous global forces,” said Morgan Cloud, Emory professor of law.
Cloud is one of the founders of a new Emory course covering nearly every aspect of the meth epidemic. It brings together faculty and students from law, business, religion, economics, anthropology, biology, public health, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology and more.
The course takes its name, and built its curriculum, from the book “Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town,” by Nick Reding. Through personal stories of people ravaged by meth, the author shows how 30 years of deregulation and globalization affected Oelwine, Iowa.
For more than 100 years, “there was no such thing as unemployment in Oelwine,” Reding said in a recent public talk at Emory.
The town’s long prosperity, built around farming, the railroads and meatpacking, began to change in the late 1980s. Agribusiness emerged to displace family farms. Local people no longer owned the land, the grain elevators or the stores where they shopped. A conglomerate bought up the meat packing plants, dissolving the unions: Workers who once earned $18 an hour were reduced to $5.60 an hour, without benefits.
The impact was “apocalyptic,” Reding said. A collective feeling of depression settled on the town. People fled in droves. Tax revenue dried up. Schools faced threats of bankruptcy and law enforcement staff was slashed.
Meth filled the vacuum, giving users the ability to stay awake through three shifts at the packing plant and make ends meet. “It’s the most American drug,” Reding said. “It helps you achieve the dream of superseding class through a lot of hard work, and you feel good while doing it.”
Other forces also fueled the drug epidemic and the changing way of life, Reding said. “Big pharma” lobbied against laws to change the ingredients of common cold medicine, used to make meth. Immigrants poured in to take the low-paying jobs. Five Mexican cartels took over 85 percent of all the U.S. drug trafficking business, channeling their distribution into the flow of immigrants.
When his book was published last year, Reding said he received death threats, and accusations that he had betrayed America. “A lot of people seem to resist the idea that drugs and poverty could go together in rural America the way they do in the inner cities.”
Reding, who teaches journalism at Washington University in St. Louis, is working on a new book, "Heartland," a portrait of what the Midwest might look like in 40 years.
